Creative writing essentials means perceiving fundamental needs of readers and viewers to get their fears and longings out symbolically in great stories. It means knowing and creating with universal themes that plague all humanity. It means having a wonderful bag of writing craft tools to draw on in telling your story. It means giving your story a believable context of information, exotic places and reality so that your victim, your reader and viewer, is drawn seductively in.

Character is a creative writing essential. Characters do not drive story. Story drives characters in all the stories that sell well. You have got to know this if there is any chance that you can develop into a well-selling writer with people who read your novels by the thousands, if not millions.

You have got to know the essentials of creative writing and use these essentials at the highest levels to be at all successful as a writer.

And you have got to develop a terrific imagination. You have got to keep dramatizing your actual life and the lives of those around you until you are really good at imagining whole stories in an instant over some minor but significant detail in a life.

Creative Writing and Writers.com is all about writing craft, the essential tools of the writing craft that give you the means to turn a great story into also a great novel.

You don’t have to be the best in the field, but you do have to be damn good. Agreed?

Writing Task
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You can test yourself as to your ability as a writer, whether you have written significant things or not, by doing this exercise. Take one incident or element from your life, or the life of someone you know and exaggerate it. You are being creative here. Use the reality incident but make it extreme in a number of ways. Now imagine telling this exaggerated story to someone you know. You can in a conversation today just exaggerate something someone has done as if it is a true life story. Have fun with it. Fess up at the end. Or if you are a true writer you might never let your friend know the truth.